New About.com Feature Article

Julia Houston, About.com's Star Trek Guide, has posted the latest edition of her weekly feature article series. This week she looks at the evolution of Dr. Julian Bashir from the DS9 equivalent of Wesley to being just as flawed as the rest of the crew.

There have been very few Star Trek characters who started out as poorly as Dr. Julian Bashir did.

DS9 was the first non-Enterprise Star Trek, and thus faced a special challenge with its characters. The station's crew were no longer to be the cream of the crop, flagship staff of TOS and TNG. These people were on the frontier, with a mix of backgrounds and agendas. Indeed, the one real character carry-over to DS9 from TNG (in the first seasons) was Miles O'Brien, the most non-TNG-like of that bunch: the normal family man among the super-misfits and super-geniuses.

Conversely, Bashir stuck out on DS9 by being the most TNG-like, graduating all but top of his class and beating out even Wesley Crusher in his innocence and good intentions. He needed a "twist" to make him fit the darker niche of DS9, but unfortunately the twist he got didn't really work. Bashir's naive self-confidence tended dangerously towards self-adsorption, and it's all too obvious in those first couple of seasons that the writers and Siddig hadn't a clue what to make of him.